London meeting underway

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The first leadership conference since GAFCON in 2008 is underway in London.

200 clergy and lay leaders, men and women from more than 25 countries, are gathered in London this week.

The meeting was the initiative of GAFCON primates through the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA), which was established after the Jerusalem meeting in 2008.

It follows the latest meeting of the GAFCON/FCA primates council, chaired by the Most Rev’d Eliud Wabukala, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya.

A media statement is due on Monday (UK time).

Archbishop Peter Jensen is the General Secretary of the FCA, and several Sydney delegates attended the conference, including Dr Mark Thompson, Peter Rogers and Malcolm RIchards from CMS, Dr Claire Smith and lawyer Gillian Davidson as well as the Rector of Cherrybrook, Gav Poole who played a leading organisational role.

Delegates came from other parts of Australia, South Pacific, Asia, Africa, the Middle east and from across the UK.

It is being held at St Mark’s, Battersea Rise and will hear from by speakers including Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, the Rev. Dr. Ashley Null, and Bishop John Akao.

Against the backdrop of the increasingly liberal path chosen by the US Episcopal Church, the consecration of openly homosexual bishops and clergy and denial of basic biblical doctrines in some Northern hemisphere provinces, Abp Wabukala expressed the hope that God would bless the conference by “turning this present crisis moment into a visionary future.”